The way "Your rights online" is one of the busiest/. categories, the way half the stories have little or nothing to do with IT, and the way articles are almost always spun in terms of "What individual rights will be lost?" rather than "What might society as a whole gain?", for example?
Although I'd normally agree with you in principle, I'm not so sure that your second question has applied in the past several years.
Can you look me straight in the face and tell me that society as a whole has benefitted considerably from the Patriot Act? Heck, even the people who wrote the damn thing have admitted that its primary purpose was a whole bunch of FUD.
Perhaps you could apply your arguments to a hypothetical socialized healthcare system. Some individual rights would indeed be lost if the system were implemented, while society as a whole would probably benefit.
How about banning gay marriage? It's pretty obvious how this one infringes upon individual rights, and I frankly can't figure out how the hell it propagates out to benefit society as a whole, if it even does so at all. The whole "attack on the family" argument is a load of BS, and there is absolutely no evidence supporting it. The fact that it's been added to more than a few state constitutions in the US is perhaps the most troubling development of the past 10 years.
In NYC, you also have an added benefit, where buildings don't need to supply their own heat, and thus don't need smokestacks on top. It's not as big of a deal today, but nearly 100 years ago, it was a HUGE deal. These days, it's nice to just have the added efficiency of centralized generation.
Less pollution, more flexible architectural requirements, everybody wins.
Now only if the government would start spending more on other public-good infrastructure projects...
I'm no expert on these things, but wouldn't it make sense to leave the astronauts on the ISS to be returned by a Soyuz capsule, rather than risking their lives by landing them on a potentially damaged craft?
After all, the shuttle did gain the ability to land on its own a few years back.
Sure, Russia would have to send 2 extra pods to the ISS, but from what I understand, that's a fairly trivial procedure when compared to a shuttle launch. (Compare thesetwo pictures. Note the size of the man standing next to the rocket, along with the profound lack of ground infrastructure.)
Plug a crummy $15 unmanaged hub into itself (ie. create a physical loopback).
You'll likely generate a packet storm that works its way surprisingly far up the network until a fairly expensive/intelligent piece of equipment catches and blocks it.
This happened once in the middle school I worked at. Our backbone switches caught it, but it did take an entire wing of the building offline for an hour or so before we could isolate the problem (we had some nice managed switches on the backend, and midrange Netgear switches in the rest of the building, and a single damn hub sitting dormant behind someone's desk).
After that incident, we purchased and installed managed switches on the next level of hierarchy, and ran some extra so that no more than four computers were more than a single hop away from a managed switch, with most being directly connected to "very nice" hardware. The fiber-linked backbone we got along with it was a nice perk that essentially came "free" with our improved infrastructure.
This was in a modestly funded K-8 school with about 300 students in it. For anything remotely similar to happen in one of the largest airports in the country is completely and profoundly inexcusable. Their IT staff had better have a damned good excuse if they want to keep their jobs.
I'd grant them that such a failure could take out a single ticketing counter or something like a baggage carousel if they weren't meticulously careful when planning the network. However, to take out the entire airport is incomprehensible.
Buran was dropped due to a lack of funds because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left their space program strapped for cash.
Although Buran was essentially a copy of the Shuttle, the Soviet engineers were able to surmise its shortcomings and address those issues. For starters, it wasn't as vulnerable to the mess we had with Columbia, and are having again with Endeavour.
The crew compartment was supposedly reinforced and structurally isolated from the rest of the ship, suggesting that a Challenger or Columbia type disaster could have been potentially survivable.
Buran was launched piggybacked on an Energia booster (which is the closest thing Russia had to a Saturn V) -- economies of scale suggest that this would have been cheaper in the long-run, not to mention that it kept a large multi-purpose launch vehicle in Russia's "arsenal", something which the US currently lacks (not to mention that an Energia could have sent up huge portions of the ISS in one go, rather than expensively constructing it bit by bit as we are doing now.
Buran could fly and land automnously. The space shuttle gained this ability only recently, and to my knowledge, it's never been attempted. This combined with the continuation of the Soyuz program hypothetically allows the crew to stay aboard Mir/ISS, and return via a Soyuz capsule, while the Shuttle lands on its own in the case that it was damaged during takeoff, and would be risky to land.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if NASA uses a similar strategy to get the crew of Endeavour home.
It still wasn't a great idea all in all, but it made a hell of a lot more sense than the Shuttle does. Kliper looks very promising at the moment, and may be a "best of both worlds" compromise between traditonal capsules and shuttle-type craft.
Having mucked around in the maze of smoke and mirrors that is TeX, I must challenge that title.
Knuth is obviously a fantastic theorist, and I do appreciate the contributions he's made to the field.
However, his creation, TeX, isn't exactly a shining beacon of how to write a program/standard. Sure, it's great in concept, but more often than not, I find myself cursing the heavens for its unpredictability and cryptic debugging output when something goes wrong.
I've been using UbuntuPPC for the past few months.
It's excellent, and honestly doesn't feel any different than the X86 version apart from the profound absence of binary-only software such as Flash, Google Earth, and even a barely usable JVM.
It's delightfully ironic that the rest of the operating system (written in languages like C and C++) works perfectly fine, whereas Java is completely non-functional.
Can we please stop treating Java as if it's a serious language? It's a complete and total failure on so many levels. Writing an application in C, and using a cross-platform toolkit such as GTK+ could easily avoid many of the headaches of Java, whilst offering vastly improved performance and usability.
GIMP represents a vestige of thie old linux world. It tries to do too much, and fails miserably at all of it. The UI's confusing, the feature set doesn't even remotely rival Photoshop, and it's never going to be taken seriously until it gets a new name.
I think over the past few months, Linux has been inching toward that magical critical mass that the OSS evangelists have predicted would come some day*...
I mean... all the signs are in place. I've toyed around with linux on and off for years, and have *always* reverted back to Windows or Mac OS after a few months full of small frustrations.
Now I've got Ubuntu on my Mac, and have no intention of switching back. Microsoft's latest operating system is horrible -- and the general public realizes it. Major vendors are shipping linux, and enthusiastically supporting it. We've finally got a highly-usable desktop distribution (Ubuntu), and the small kinks that are present in it are being quickly ironed out.
*And frankly, I didn't really believe that Linux would ever get its act together enough to achieve widespread popularity. I thought that the first viable/wildly popular open-source desktop would be some sort of "dark horse" candidate from way out in left field (perhaps something like openBeOS) that would quickly mature and gather a large audience, sort of in the manner that Firefox did.
Really? If you're measuring success in terms of radio plays, then yes -- singles are going to be important.
However, there has been a *very* strong swing toward making cohesive albums in the past few years (to the degree that some artists are cutting songs from albums and releasing them as b-sides).
To the same effect, it's perfectly reasonable to release a 40-minute album, or even just an EP, as long as that limited selection is good. Voxtrot comes to mind as being a current band with several fantastic EPs, and one mediocre LP.
In fact, the most successful and talented musicians are the ones who write albums that are cohesive, and more or less good the entire way through. I don't think that any serious musician wants to be a one-hit-wonder.
Would you rather be Rick Springfield or Pink Floyd?
I think we've already established that popular music isn't necessarily good music (especially for the past 5 years or so, where the industry has absolutely and completely gone to hell).
Go listen to an album by The Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, The Decemberists, Of Montreal, or any other respected independent artist, and if you enjoy it, chances are that you'll find yourself enjoying the album, instead of the songs.
I brought this up a little over a month ago, and listed a few albums that have stood out to me in the past few years.
In fact, this summer alone has produced several albums that have quickly made it near the top of my list of all-time favorites.
Boxer by The National
Ga ga ga ga ga by Spoon
The Stage Names by Okkervil River
The Shephard's Dog by Iron & Wine (not out yet, but probably the best of the bunch)
If you listen to tracks from these albums without hearing the whole thing, you're seriously missing out. Anybody familiar with 'The Wall' by Pink Floyd should know exactly what I'm talking about.
Yes, but on Unix, user accounts generally aren't given administrator access, and on many "modern" distributions, you use "sudo" instead of "su", which makes it virtually impossible to accidentally give an application admin-level privileges, as you've got to explicitly call it for every root-level process that you execute.
The absolute worst you can do is to trash your user account. It's not pleasant, but it's a hell of a lot better than infecting your entire system.
This functionality is hypothetically available in Windows, but is often overlooked (and I believe the 'Run As User' context menu item is turned off by default). Therefore, for the sake of convenience, Windows users (and their processes) are more often than not given Administrator access. This way, every exploit is a root-level exploit.
If somebody put me in a big room lined with two-way mirrors, and completely devoid of any objects beside the gun, then yeah.... I'm going to act a bit differently than I would otherwise, and I'd probably pick up the gun.
Microsoft's problems have largely lied in their management for the past 10 years or so.
Whenever the management makes one big push, as was done with Vista, things get screwed up horribly. You'd better believe that Microsoft has some very smart people working for them that know a thing or two about security.
The underpinnings of Windows that kept it compatible with old software have made it inherently insecure, and every tiny bug can result in a system-wide breach thanks to the fact that until recently, it was the standard procedure to run every process with unlimited credentials (and most software was written with this assumption in mind)
On my Linux box, Apache runs under its own account that has the permission to serve web pages in/var/www, and is restricted from doing *anything else* at a very low level in the operating system. Windows apps tend to be able to do whatever the hell they want.
The decision to maintain backward compatibility was most definitely made by upper-management, and the security repercussions were almost definitely brought to their attention at some point. It's not at all surprising that there are factions in Microsoft that disagree with this decision
True, but at the very least, this will turn quite a few heads in the scientific community.
Scientific computation often isn't all that different from the SPEC synthetic benchmarks.
Plus, thanks to the magic of open-source software, it's relatively easy to get stuff to run on it by doing a simple recompile. Ubuntu's PowerPC repository is every bit as good as its i386 repo with the mildly annoying exceptions of closed-source apps like Flash, and (ironically) Java. It wouldn't be all that hard to create another repo for SPARC.
Gentoo would literally automate this process, and there's always netBSD, which runs on more platforms than my sneakers do.
Society maintains itself through having kids. It's been observed that family units tend to give kids better starts and are less prone to crime. Thus the society has a vested interest to promote this. If you've made a conscious choice to opt out, then they be wise to push you towards making a greater contribution through higher taxes. Your singledom generally doesn't forward the society. Occasional outlyers exists (Alan Turing etc..). beside the tax credit a family gets does not even make up half of what kids cost. I am single and I don't mind.
Completely offtopic, but you bring up a great point, which is that it's completely and absolutely hypocritical for a social conservative to argue against gay marriage and/or civil unions. Under that ideology, the more people who fit into that structure, the better it's going to work out. Alienating members of society from these family units will only create discord, and impede the "system".
However, FireFox is still the superior browser in many cases. WebKit's javascript and CSS implementations are incomplete in several cases. It's not as common as it used to be, but there are still a few sites that will legitimately work in Firefox, but not Safari or Konqueror.
It's very obvious from the first two google results for 'ubuntu apache'.
I hate to be the one to call RTFM, but if you can set up your own domain name with a publicly-exposed IP address, you can most certainly install Apache on Ubuntu.
People (I.T. guys included) will almost always go with what they are comfortable with. IIS is very easy to configure and you could have a Windows Server up and running in no time. With Apache, it's not so simple. Modifying text files gives the admins great control over nearly everything; but it's not so simple. And some n00b admin couldn't exactly master Apache in a weekend like they could IIS.
This gives you a setup that works right off the bat, and is reasonably secure. IIS has *nothing* on Apache. Configuring a more flexible site does take a bit of elbow grease, but I wouldn't say that it's any more than IIS.
Upgrades are also a cinch, and don't require a reboot.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I'd normally agree with you in principle, I'm not so sure that your second question has applied in the past several years.
Can you look me straight in the face and tell me that society as a whole has benefitted considerably from the Patriot Act? Heck, even the people who wrote the damn thing have admitted that its primary purpose was a whole bunch of FUD.
Perhaps you could apply your arguments to a hypothetical socialized healthcare system. Some individual rights would indeed be lost if the system were implemented, while society as a whole would probably benefit.
How about banning gay marriage? It's pretty obvious how this one infringes upon individual rights, and I frankly can't figure out how the hell it propagates out to benefit society as a whole, if it even does so at all. The whole "attack on the family" argument is a load of BS, and there is absolutely no evidence supporting it. The fact that it's been added to more than a few state constitutions in the US is perhaps the most troubling development of the past 10 years.
How much of a toll could that possibly be?
Pick up the phone. Listen to the time. Hang up. 20 seconds max.
Do phone companies even charge for calls that short anymore?
You're right. Flash under OS X is (presently) absolutely miserable.
It's not unusual for a single flash applet to suck up 100% CPU on even a recent Mac while sitting idle.
More than a dump truck
In NYC, you also have an added benefit, where buildings don't need to supply their own heat, and thus don't need smokestacks on top. It's not as big of a deal today, but nearly 100 years ago, it was a HUGE deal. These days, it's nice to just have the added efficiency of centralized generation.
Less pollution, more flexible architectural requirements, everybody wins.
Now only if the government would start spending more on other public-good infrastructure projects...
I'm no expert on these things, but wouldn't it make sense to leave the astronauts on the ISS to be returned by a Soyuz capsule, rather than risking their lives by landing them on a potentially damaged craft?
After all, the shuttle did gain the ability to land on its own a few years back.
Sure, Russia would have to send 2 extra pods to the ISS, but from what I understand, that's a fairly trivial procedure when compared to a shuttle launch. (Compare these two pictures. Note the size of the man standing next to the rocket, along with the profound lack of ground infrastructure.)
Plug a crummy $15 unmanaged hub into itself (ie. create a physical loopback).
You'll likely generate a packet storm that works its way surprisingly far up the network until a fairly expensive/intelligent piece of equipment catches and blocks it.
This happened once in the middle school I worked at. Our backbone switches caught it, but it did take an entire wing of the building offline for an hour or so before we could isolate the problem (we had some nice managed switches on the backend, and midrange Netgear switches in the rest of the building, and a single damn hub sitting dormant behind someone's desk).
After that incident, we purchased and installed managed switches on the next level of hierarchy, and ran some extra so that no more than four computers were more than a single hop away from a managed switch, with most being directly connected to "very nice" hardware. The fiber-linked backbone we got along with it was a nice perk that essentially came "free" with our improved infrastructure.
This was in a modestly funded K-8 school with about 300 students in it. For anything remotely similar to happen in one of the largest airports in the country is completely and profoundly inexcusable. Their IT staff had better have a damned good excuse if they want to keep their jobs.
I'd grant them that such a failure could take out a single ticketing counter or something like a baggage carousel if they weren't meticulously careful when planning the network. However, to take out the entire airport is incomprehensible.
Didn't you hear? The bill of rights is so last-administration these days....
I know! Can't you see the look of surprise on that kid's face?
I've more or less given up on attempting to understand Japan...
Right on all accounts apart from the last one.
Buran was dropped due to a lack of funds because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left their space program strapped for cash.
Although Buran was essentially a copy of the Shuttle, the Soviet engineers were able to surmise its shortcomings and address those issues. For starters, it wasn't as vulnerable to the mess we had with Columbia, and are having again with Endeavour.
The crew compartment was supposedly reinforced and structurally isolated from the rest of the ship, suggesting that a Challenger or Columbia type disaster could have been potentially survivable.
Buran was launched piggybacked on an Energia booster (which is the closest thing Russia had to a Saturn V) -- economies of scale suggest that this would have been cheaper in the long-run, not to mention that it kept a large multi-purpose launch vehicle in Russia's "arsenal", something which the US currently lacks (not to mention that an Energia could have sent up huge portions of the ISS in one go, rather than expensively constructing it bit by bit as we are doing now.
Buran could fly and land automnously. The space shuttle gained this ability only recently, and to my knowledge, it's never been attempted. This combined with the continuation of the Soyuz program hypothetically allows the crew to stay aboard Mir/ISS, and return via a Soyuz capsule, while the Shuttle lands on its own in the case that it was damaged during takeoff, and would be risky to land.
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if NASA uses a similar strategy to get the crew of Endeavour home.
It still wasn't a great idea all in all, but it made a hell of a lot more sense than the Shuttle does. Kliper looks very promising at the moment, and may be a "best of both worlds" compromise between traditonal capsules and shuttle-type craft.
Having mucked around in the maze of smoke and mirrors that is TeX, I must challenge that title.
Knuth is obviously a fantastic theorist, and I do appreciate the contributions he's made to the field.
However, his creation, TeX, isn't exactly a shining beacon of how to write a program/standard. Sure, it's great in concept, but more often than not, I find myself cursing the heavens for its unpredictability and cryptic debugging output when something goes wrong.
I've been using UbuntuPPC for the past few months.
It's excellent, and honestly doesn't feel any different than the X86 version apart from the profound absence of binary-only software such as Flash, Google Earth, and even a barely usable JVM.
It's delightfully ironic that the rest of the operating system (written in languages like C and C++) works perfectly fine, whereas Java is completely non-functional.
Can we please stop treating Java as if it's a serious language? It's a complete and total failure on so many levels. Writing an application in C, and using a cross-platform toolkit such as GTK+ could easily avoid many of the headaches of Java, whilst offering vastly improved performance and usability.
Meh. Not The GIMP.
GIMP represents a vestige of thie old linux world. It tries to do too much, and fails miserably at all of it. The UI's confusing, the feature set doesn't even remotely rival Photoshop, and it's never going to be taken seriously until it gets a new name.
I think over the past few months, Linux has been inching toward that magical critical mass that the OSS evangelists have predicted would come some day*...
I mean... all the signs are in place. I've toyed around with linux on and off for years, and have *always* reverted back to Windows or Mac OS after a few months full of small frustrations.
Now I've got Ubuntu on my Mac, and have no intention of switching back. Microsoft's latest operating system is horrible -- and the general public realizes it. Major vendors are shipping linux, and enthusiastically supporting it. We've finally got a highly-usable desktop distribution (Ubuntu), and the small kinks that are present in it are being quickly ironed out.
*And frankly, I didn't really believe that Linux would ever get its act together enough to achieve widespread popularity. I thought that the first viable/wildly popular open-source desktop would be some sort of "dark horse" candidate from way out in left field (perhaps something like openBeOS) that would quickly mature and gather a large audience, sort of in the manner that Firefox did.
However, there has been a *very* strong swing toward making cohesive albums in the past few years (to the degree that some artists are cutting songs from albums and releasing them as b-sides).
To the same effect, it's perfectly reasonable to release a 40-minute album, or even just an EP, as long as that limited selection is good. Voxtrot comes to mind as being a current band with several fantastic EPs, and one mediocre LP.
In fact, the most successful and talented musicians are the ones who write albums that are cohesive, and more or less good the entire way through. I don't think that any serious musician wants to be a one-hit-wonder.
Would you rather be Rick Springfield or Pink Floyd?
I think we've already established that popular music isn't necessarily good music (especially for the past 5 years or so, where the industry has absolutely and completely gone to hell).
Go listen to an album by The Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, Andrew Bird, The Decemberists, Of Montreal, or any other respected independent artist, and if you enjoy it, chances are that you'll find yourself enjoying the album, instead of the songs.
I brought this up a little over a month ago, and listed a few albums that have stood out to me in the past few years.
In fact, this summer alone has produced several albums that have quickly made it near the top of my list of all-time favorites.
If you listen to tracks from these albums without hearing the whole thing, you're seriously missing out. Anybody familiar with 'The Wall' by Pink Floyd should know exactly what I'm talking about.
Yes, but on Unix, user accounts generally aren't given administrator access, and on many "modern" distributions, you use "sudo" instead of "su", which makes it virtually impossible to accidentally give an application admin-level privileges, as you've got to explicitly call it for every root-level process that you execute.
The absolute worst you can do is to trash your user account. It's not pleasant, but it's a hell of a lot better than infecting your entire system.
This functionality is hypothetically available in Windows, but is often overlooked (and I believe the 'Run As User' context menu item is turned off by default). Therefore, for the sake of convenience, Windows users (and their processes) are more often than not given Administrator access. This way, every exploit is a root-level exploit.
If somebody put me in a big room lined with two-way mirrors, and completely devoid of any objects beside the gun, then yeah.... I'm going to act a bit differently than I would otherwise, and I'd probably pick up the gun.
What's your point here?
Microsoft's problems have largely lied in their management for the past 10 years or so.
/var/www, and is restricted from doing *anything else* at a very low level in the operating system. Windows apps tend to be able to do whatever the hell they want.
Whenever the management makes one big push, as was done with Vista, things get screwed up horribly. You'd better believe that Microsoft has some very smart people working for them that know a thing or two about security.
The underpinnings of Windows that kept it compatible with old software have made it inherently insecure, and every tiny bug can result in a system-wide breach thanks to the fact that until recently, it was the standard procedure to run every process with unlimited credentials (and most software was written with this assumption in mind)
On my Linux box, Apache runs under its own account that has the permission to serve web pages in
The decision to maintain backward compatibility was most definitely made by upper-management, and the security repercussions were almost definitely brought to their attention at some point. It's not at all surprising that there are factions in Microsoft that disagree with this decision
True, but at the very least, this will turn quite a few heads in the scientific community.
Scientific computation often isn't all that different from the SPEC synthetic benchmarks.
Plus, thanks to the magic of open-source software, it's relatively easy to get stuff to run on it by doing a simple recompile. Ubuntu's PowerPC repository is every bit as good as its i386 repo with the mildly annoying exceptions of closed-source apps like Flash, and (ironically) Java. It wouldn't be all that hard to create another repo for SPARC.
Gentoo would literally automate this process, and there's always netBSD, which runs on more platforms than my sneakers do.
Their life expectancy also tends to be quite a bit longer.
This means that women are either healthier in the long-run, or that their health care costs are even higher.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but that the issue might be a bit more complicated than it appears on the surface.
Completely offtopic, but you bring up a great point, which is that it's completely and absolutely hypocritical for a social conservative to argue against gay marriage and/or civil unions. Under that ideology, the more people who fit into that structure, the better it's going to work out. Alienating members of society from these family units will only create discord, and impede the "system".
Sure, Mozilla's trademark is pretty stupid.
However, FireFox is still the superior browser in many cases. WebKit's javascript and CSS implementations are incomplete in several cases. It's not as common as it used to be, but there are still a few sites that will legitimately work in Firefox, but not Safari or Konqueror.
It's very obvious from the first two google results for 'ubuntu apache'.
I hate to be the one to call RTFM, but if you can set up your own domain name with a publicly-exposed IP address, you can most certainly install Apache on Ubuntu.
Be careful of using technology-related sarcasm on slashdot. Somebody's going to read that, mod it as 'Insightful', and mean it.
Really? This gives you a setup that works right off the bat, and is reasonably secure. IIS has *nothing* on Apache. Configuring a more flexible site does take a bit of elbow grease, but I wouldn't say that it's any more than IIS.
Upgrades are also a cinch, and don't require a reboot.